Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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The world's economy changed today. The United States slapped new tariffs on dozens of countries early this morning, following through on Donald Trump's repeated threats to do so. What this is all going to do to world trade and the American economy is really anyone's guess at this point, but it's definitely going to have some sort of effect. American economic policy has returned to a high-tariff scenario not seen in over 90 years, which adds to the uncertainty about what happens next. Since there is no modern data for where we find ourselves now, nobody really knows what is going to happen. But there are a few things that we can intelligently guess about, the first of which is that prices are going to rise for American consumers on all kinds of goods, some of which will be mild price hikes and some of which will be huge:

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We are now two days away from Donald Trump's latest arbitrary deadline with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Talks continued today, and seemed (from the little information released) to have at least been somewhat more productive than the last time any talks happened. But it's also highly unlikely that Putin will accept Trump's demand for a permanent ceasefire and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. The question now is what Putin will actually offer Trump and how Trump will react to it.

One development that seems to have come from the meeting is that both sides are talking about a possible meeting between Putin and Trump, perhaps as early as next week. Is this more of Putin's stalling, or a real indicator that some sort of solution is getting close? It's impossible to say. But it does seem like a good sign, at least.

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There's a slogan used by those who support redistricting reform that is worth starting with today: "Voters should pick their politicians; the politicians shouldn't be able to pick their voters." But the process of designing districts -- for U.S. House of Representatives seats as well as state legislative seats -- has long been a political process. The word "gerrymandering" was coined to describe a Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) who, while serving in office in 1812, approved a district so convoluted that a newspaper drew it as a mythical lizard with the name "the gerrymander." The name stuck, which shows you this sort of thing has been going on for over two centuries now.

Usually these battles are fought immediately after the decennial Census, as states have to adjust to a new number of House members (whether fewer or more). But it's not illegal for a state to redistrict mid-decade, which has been happening more and more frequently over the past couple of decades.

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The entire financial world is holding its breath right now, waiting to see whether they can continue their trust in official U.S. government economic figures or not. Will things like the official unemployment rate and inflation rate become just another casualty in Donald Trump's war on the truth and his war on science, or will the professionals who produce these numbers (as opposed to the agency's leader) continue to do a good and honest job -- even with the threat of being fired now hanging over their heads? That is an unanswered question, but we will begin to see fairly quickly which direction the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to head.

Over the course of the next month, there are multiple scheduled data releases before the next monthly jobs report comes out (usually on the first Friday after the end of a month, which would make it September 5th). There will be one more big jobs report and two inflation reports released in that time, and you can bet people will be watching closely to see whether they can be trusted or not.

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Today's job numbers are bad. There's no getting around it. So Donald Trump reacted to this bad news by immediately firing the messenger. Which is really bad. "Banana republic" bad, in fact. We should all expect Trump to name the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who will then dutifully report next month that "in August, America added eight million new jobs, thanks to our Dear Leader's brilliance." Because that is obviously what Trump wants to hear, instead of any proof that the fantasy world he inhabits in his head is rosier than the actual reality in which the rest of us live.

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As we head into the next few years, America will be experiencing more and more 250th anniversaries. Unlike the bicentennial we went through in 1976, these events will apparently be called by a number of different names (take your pick): semiquincentennial, sestercentennial, bisesquicentennial, or just quarter-millennial (I'm sure we'll all settle on one of these, by next July 4th). In any case, and whatever you call it, last Saturday was the 250th birthday of what became today's United States Postal Service.

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Today, former Vice President Kamala Harris ended all the speculation about her mounting a campaign to become California's next governor. By doing so, she amped up a bunch of speculation about her mounting a campaign to become president in 2028. As a Californian, I have to say I am relieved that Harris won't be running for governor next year, and I am also profoundly unexcited about the prospect of Harris running for president.

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The next few weeks could be fairly pivotal for the U.S. economy, with new monthly economic numbers being released telling us where we are now, while perhaps new tariff numbers will be imposed by the end of the week which may tell us where we are headed with the rest of the world. All of these outcomes hinge mostly on how Donald Trump's big trade war with the rest of the planet continues to play out.

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A half-century ago, a piece of conventional political wisdom was born. President Richard Nixon was eventually forced to resign his presidency due to the Watergate scandal -- the first time this had ever happened in America -- and the phrase: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" was born. The quote is not ascribed to any individual, it just became a commonplace way of talking about the scandal that engulfed Nixon and his administration. Today, in a sort of meta way, the White House is once again engulfed in a scandal, except this time it is once-more-removed. It's not the crime or the cover-up, it has now become "the cover-up of the cover-up" that bedevils Donald Trump.

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